Mega Man Xtreme gave me flashbacks to the hardest game I have ever beaten, Shantae. Mega Man Xtreme is a port of Mega Man X for the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System). This game tricked me into thinking it was just a standard boss rush with its simple story, challenging but reasonably beatable gameplay, and an awesome soundtrack. But at the very end, it was so enraging I wanted to throw my Gameboy out the window (and I would have had it not cost upwards of $100).
Mega Man Xtreme’s story is very simple when you get down to it. It boils down to: “There’s a virus in the database, go into the virtual database (Because I guess that’s just possible or something?) and fight the security guarding the virus, which consists of the old data of X’s past foes.” It’s nearly as simple as it gets.
I love video game bosses. It’s been my favorite thing about these old games as I’ve been playing them, some of my favorites coming from the Zelda series and Kirby’s Dreamland 2. I knew that the Mega Man series was famous for its extremely challenging boss fights, and wanted to try my hand at this test of skill known as Mega Man Xtreme. My introduction felt very unsuspicious, as the level itself was very short. The boss took some time to beat, mostly due to the fact that my Gameboy Advance SP charger broke halfway through my attempts at beating this guy. Regardless, Chill Penguin was pretty easy looking back on it. The other bosses went the same way, and to be perfectly honest even though they were hard, I was having (drumroll please) fun. When I say easy I mean they’re challenging and fun. However…
The end of this game broke me. There is not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR fights that you have to go through before reaching the final boss’s second and final form. The first is Zain. I’m gonna sound like a crazy dude telling you about how the moon is made out of literal cardboard when I’m telling you this but Zain has twice the hitbox of a normal boss. This means that Zain is twice as big as all the other bosses because half of that is a giant sword looking like it was stolen from Final Fantasy 7. And he hits like a dump truck too. Zain deals so much more damage than everyone else!! I eventually realized why I hated this fight so much, and it’s because Zain is difficult for all the wrong reasons. Instead of giving him cool attacks that made him seem unique and challenging in his own way, they made Zain harder by making his hitbox and attack bigger. That just makes things feel unfair. Not to mention that Zain isn’t even in the original Mega Man X.
But so what? It’s just one challenging fight. That’s what I thought, but no. The next boss, known as the Bospider, is even worse. Basically, the way this boss works is it makes its way down to you from the top of the screen through a series of bars, and you get about two seconds to guess where it’s gonna go. This fight took me forever, and the bosses afterward were also hard (but not nearly as enraging).
At the end of the day, Mega Man Xtreme was a fun game. It definitely had some spots that felt unfair or unreasonably hard in some places. But it was a good game. It helps that the soundtrack is a banger too because I’m a simp for good video game music. I love how it sets the atmosphere, and overall really gets you into the game. I’m listening to the soundtrack while writing this, and let me just say that Flame Stag’s stage absolutely slaps. Every boss’s stage has its own music, which really helps give each boss their own unique feel. Unfortunately, the actual boss battle music is all the same, so that’s one point taken off for the soundtrack.
Gameplay ★★★★★
Story ★★☆☆☆
Visuals ★★★☆☆
Soundtrack ★★★★☆
(Side note, I also found this very strange post while looking to see if there were any glitches in the game I could exploit. If something similar has happened to your own copy I’d be very interested in seeing what you have to say in the comments. Then again, it could very well be a creepypasta or “spooky story” of some kind.)